Archive for January, 2010

Neptune-Pluto is so big, and so underway (one aspect of the Seventh Harmonic is that it operates invisibly), that we have to look pretty hard to see it. Not so with the second-biggest energy we’re laboring under, Uranus-Pluto. Uranus-Pluto energy is front and center, even though it’s hiding (both/and, eh?). Uranus represents individuality, Pluto compulsion – I gotta be me, it ain’t optional. In the 1960s, the Pluto-in-Leo generation reached their 20s. Pluto in Leo is another gotta be me energy. And it was the mid-1960s – October 1965 – when Uranus-Pluto initiated a new Cycle.

The Symbol for this Uranus-Pluto Cycle is A Ouija board (Virgo 18). Rudhyar‘s reading calls for greater psychic sensitivity and a deepening of contact with the Unconscious. Uranus-Pluto is a 140-year Cycle. This energy is front-and-center now because it’s Uranus-Pluto that characterizes 2012. In 2012, Uranus reaches a Fourth-Harmonic relationship to Pluto. We’ve been referring to this as the 1960s become permanent, because the waxing Fourth Harmonic is the point in the Cycle where the energy becomes dominant.

The 1960s were probably scariest for the Pluto-in-Cancer (don’t rock the boat, because the Great Depression proved to us that you need to conform to survive, and embodying the sign Cancer, survival is what we do) parents of the Pluto-in-Leo (gotta be me, survival or not) generation that was reaching it’s “maturity.” Most of the Pluto-in-Cancer folks have moved on, so who’s left to be scared of 2012?

If you were alive then, what is your ongoing legacy from the 1960s? For us it was disappointment in humanity and in people, and cynicism about Freedom and Lawn Order. We can see those themes very clearly in the World Mirror today. What are your own themes? We gotta love ’em into oblivion. Whatever taste the 1960s left in your mouth, it’s critical to clear it before 2012, or the World will grind your face in it.

If you were born after the 1960s, it’s your parents’ leftovers that you’ll be dealing with. Do you know what those are? Time to start talking to your parents about their memories and their takeaways, if you can.

If you were born during the 1960s, then you embody the energy that will dominate 2012. It might feel quite chaotic in your own body, maybe characterized by some both/and variation on the Freedom-versus-Conformity theme. But when 2012 gets here, you are the leaders for the rest of us, because you know the energy nauseously well – you live it every day. 2012 is your Shamanic moment.

Actually, the Fourth-Harmonic Uranus-Pluto event runs from 2012 through 2015. Barring discontinuities, we’ll have four years to play with the furthur possibilities that the Ouija Board offers.

But it’s not quite that simple. The Uranus-Pluto initiation occurred opposite a budding Saturn-Chiron initiation. So we have to add these two energies – defining (Saturn) the psychic realms we’re visiting, and healing (Chiron) our relationship with them.

Saturn-Chiron

The initiation of the current Saturn-Chiron Cycle occurred in April 1966, three months before John Cusack was born. John’s obsession with violence probably comes from his outabounds Mars more than either Uranus-Pluto or Saturn-Chiron. The Sabian Symbol of the Saturn-Chiron Cycle is On a small island surrounded by the vast expanse of the Sea, people live in close interaction (24 Pisces). What small island was it that dominated the news when Saturn was stationary earlier this month?

Look how amazed the Media was, that the folks who live there in such close interaction seem so relaxed about it. And why this month? Uranus does happen to be sitting on that small-island Symbol at Pisces 24, and sitting at a Twelfth-Harmonic angle to Chiron-Neptune. We know, TMI. But the Twelfth Harmonic is the pattern-breaker, it’s about releasing Limiting Beliefs. Lots of important threads here that provide deep background for the Decade, many of which we’ll unwind soon, but for today we’ll stop here.

Of course, a 65-year Cycle doesn’t snap over like a light switch. Some components of an energy shift can do that – we can think of many examples from recent history of sudden energy transformations, where everything is suddenly different. Haiti certainly felt one of these week before last. Pluto’s usually involved when everything changes, and the current shift is a Neptune initiation. Neptune seen through material eyes is a fog of confusion. Seen through spiritual eyes, Neptune represents perfect clarity.

We can’t recall who taught us this, but Confusion is actually a huge Blessing, when we receive it so. The combination of habitual emotional resistance and intellectual justification creates a birdcage that protects our identity from predation by bullies. These natural and automatic mechanisms we all employ are tremendously useful and powerful – without them we’d burn ourself on the stove every time we tried to make tea. But they also limit us. We want both/and, as usual, maybe in the form of multiple identities which we can swap in and out quickly, with an overriding governor to lend stability.

Confusion is what happens when information from beyond our birdcage leaks in and we’re confronted by a Reality that our current identity has disallowed. Worth saying again…

Confusion means we’re about to grow, if we allow it.

Of course our first reaction to confusion is defensiveness, which often manifests as anger. Defensive is good, it’s how we keep ourself safe. But we need both/and – both the willingness to defend, and the willingness to grow. With practice, we can defend with humor and without anger, while we also add a new room to our birdcage and allow ourself to grow into more comprehensive, and correspondingly more useful and powerful, identities.

A major Neptune energy shift usually happens in a fog. This particular Chiron-Neptune has come upon us in a number of stairsteps. We’ll list a few of them. If you have a journal, reviewing these should put you well ahead in discovering the mystery of what New Direction your own life will take in a few weeks. Just don’t try to be precise – use Eugene Gendlin‘s universal suffix, …or something like that.

May 2008. Chiron is still three degrees shy of Neptune, but they’re both stationary retrograde (standing still and turning backward, ie, very strong) on the same day, May 24-25. Good preview.

May 2009. Again they both turn stationary retrograde on the same day (May 28-29), but now they’re both in the fresh-violets-in-an-ancient-pottery-bowl degree of their ultimate union, and only one fourth of one degree apart when they pirouette. In addition, Jupiter crosses them both between May 23 and May 27. To an astrologer, this is jaw-dropping.

When two planets do a triple-crossing, the retrograde stations between the crossings are almost as powerful as the crossing events themselves. So the energy is already multiplied exponentially, before we consider the influence of Jupiter. Yet there’s not a lot happening on the calendar – these are hundred monkeys shifts that we won’t see clearly till they start appearing spontaneously on other islands. For instance, it was in May 2008 that Obama overtook Clinton, and that was a very fuzzy process.

In May 2009, Obama got three laws through Congress, the Fraud Enforcement Act, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, and the Credit Card Accountability Act, all well-meaning but questionable in terms of real outcomes. If these are but fogbound stepping-stones to Real Change, then perhaps Hope lingers for the Empire.

July 2009. Jupiter, after reconsidering and turning around in mid-June, again crosses Chiron and Neptune, with all three planets going backwards.

The Inner Life would have exploded here. The calendar gives us Michael Jackson’s funeral, an appropriate metaphor. If you aren’t a geographer, you might not recognize the symbolism in this one, but the UyghurRevolt occurs here. Look up Urumchiin your atlas or Google Earth. In a geographic sense, you can’t get much more internal than this, and you can’t get much richer in ancientpottery. Marco Polo slept here.

October-November 2009. Chiron goes direct on Halloween, Neptune does the same on November 4.

December 2009. Jupiter crosses Chiron on December 7, and crosses Neptune on the Solstice. The Solstice of course is the “real” beginning of the New Year.

January 2010. Chiron moves within one degree of Neptune (January 17); one degree is a common measure of the time-span of a current astrological event’s influence.

Haiti was several days earlier, while Saturn (Focus!) was standing still, and Massachusetts a few days later, after Mercury went direct (Lemme clueya!). Haiti, with its Ben-Hur-style slow-motion Media Circus, implies that major disruption in our lifestyles may be underway behind the fog, which is actually not a big surprise – we’ll talk more about that soon. We don’t mean we should expect more Katrina-class catastrophes, but yes, we should be prepared for disruptions to what we’ve come to expect – many of them have already occurred.

Of course, Saturn retrograde again crosses Pluto January 31. The Betty has pointed out that this is a rerun of astrological event that brought us the Ft Hood dysfunction – see Saturn-Pluto and January 2010 below. As we implied then, if we consider man’s inhumanity to man (not to mention women) as just another – and probably the most likely – potential “natural” disaster awaiting us, we can see Saturn-Pluto as adversity rather than oppression, and depoliticize it. While Saturn says Focus!, Saturn-Pluto shouts Or Else!! It’s relatively easy to see Mother Earth looking at Afghanistan and huffing, Killin’, you want Killin’? I’ll showya Killin’! and giving us Haiti as the metaphor.

It’s the old bumpersticker, What if they had to give a bakesale every time they wanted a new battleship, and our schools could have all the books they wanted. The Universe is a mirror, we only need to open our eyes to it. Imagine replacing the military, world over, with a Disaster Corps that put as much energy into compassion and rapid response to need, as we currently invest in violence and aggression. Yeah, yeah, I know, They started it! How old were you when you last said that and meant it? Couldn’t we have a bit more maturity in our international affairs? If we also replaced the Press Corps with the Disaster Corps, we might even get there in time to be useful.

February 2010 is very busy. Chiron and Neptune are already within orb, that is, close enough to be taken very seriously.

Venus crosses the same spot on February 7 (10pm PST); we should begin to know how we’ve changed by then.

The Moon crosses on the 13th (9pm PST) – remember the Moon is often the manifestor, so whatever specific current events materialize out of the fog, may arrive then.

Then on St. Valentine’s Day (4pm PST), the Sun is right there sniffing the Violets! Now that’s amazing (as in, the odds are about 100 to 1), that Chiron and Neptune would mate right behind the Sun! Talk about occult!

Then the actual, long-awaited Chiron-Neptune event itself – they’re within the same minute of arc (ie, one sixtieth of one degree) for about twelve hours starting around 3pm PST on February 16. Fittingly, that’s Mardi Gras– stretching into Ash Wednesday. If that isn’t an allegory of our own darma drama, I don’t know what is!

The fog (eg, will Obama really create Real Change?) may not clear until later in February, as Mercury doesn’t smell the Violets until the 27th (6am PST).

Then there is a delay in getting things rolling until March 10th (9am PST), when Mars goes direct. Mars (action, assertiveness) has been moving backwards (ie, thinking it over – gosh, am I being a bully?) since the Solstice.

Remember the Solstice, when Jupiter crossed Neptune? That could easily be the major landing in the whole Chiron-Neptune stairwell. And we haven’t even mentioned the Eclipses.

Now, the energy of a Cycle is strong at the initiation and, to the sensitive, decipherable. But then it goes underground. The classic example is the 1960s, when peace and love abounded and flowers bloomed in your hair. But then, what happened, where did it all go? The 1970s saw the Gas Crisis and the hardships that wrought, then there were the All-Hail-Business Ronnie Reagan 1980s, the Tech-is-God 1990s, and the Mission Accomplished 2000s. Lord, how we have strayed!

But the energy doesn’t stay underground. It resurfaces, and becomes permanent, when the Cycle reaches the Fourth Harmonic. Well, it’ll be many years before Chiron-Neptune reaches the Fourth Harmonic. Not to fear; every astrological event is a learning opportunity. Sure, the energy goes away, it’s no longer front and center in the World at Large. But having experienced it, we can always invoke it. It is ours to keep, all we need to do is recall the amalgam of Hope and cynicism that we’ve been living with for the last few years, and then choose to visualize the outcome that we want. Keep that in mind if you encounter any pesky Limiting Beliefs during the next half-century.

But, did we mention the 1960s? The 1960s were characterized by a Uranus-Pluto initiation. Uranus represents the individual Soul, and since Pluto energy is malleable but not resistible, a shorthand for Uranus-Pluto is I gotta be me. Well, yes, don’t forget Vietnam. Some folks do seem to gotta be bullies. And if you read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, you’ll see the sameold sameold going on behind the facade of peace and love and freedom. But the 1960s did bring the military-industrial-Congressional complex out into the open, and forced the end of the War.

We bring this up because the Mardi Gras-Ash Wednesday symbolism not only kernelizes the Miracle-despair dichotomy of Chiron-Neptune, it also hints loudly at Uranus-Pluto. The central Mardi Gras theme is letting it all hang out, this is the playful Real Me, and the central Ash Wednesday theme is I repent my wretchedness that I may be free of hubris, this is the serious Real Me. Or, Please God, believe my pretense that this Sunday-go-to-Meeting version of my identities is the Real One! What a great both/and.

Well, while the Chiron-Neptune initiation is a Very Big Deal in its own right, it also introduces the 2010-2019 Decade. Now, even before it happens, what’s the most famous year in that Decade? 2012, eh? And what happens in 2012? The Uranus-Pluto Cycle comes to the Fourth Harmonic, which is to say, the 1960s become permanent.

We been filling in background detail lately, and folks remind us that it’d be a good time to zero in to what’s Most Important, which is…

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The February 16 initiation of Chiron (the edge between despair and Miracle) by Neptune (our relationship with God). In other words, after February 16, the energy is ripe for turning Loaves into Fishes, but before February 16, every frustration we encounter is a neon mural illuminating our own personal negative Beliefs that stop us from creating Miracles.

* * * *

Miracles come in all sizes and shapes. For instance, turning Time into Money is a well-accepted Miracle-channel that’s gone clogged for a lot of folks right now. There is disruption. The World will be New after February 16. That makes it all the more important to focus on the Belief behind the frustration rather than focusing on the plan that’s being frustrated. Focusing on the frustration itself will work even better, if it’s done constructively (ie, tapping, embracing, breathing, etc.), because you’ll be less biased by objectives from the Old World (ie, your 1945-2009 Reality).

Really, it behooves to assume that we don’t know who we’ll be after Feb 16. I mean, wedo know, but our Old Us and its agenda is likely to be so wrapped up in its struggle to avoid “ego death” that it’s gonna be very quick with its Yesbuts. Actually, if your attention is finely tuned, each Yesbut is also an open doorway to releasing no-longer-relevant and no-longer-useful Beliefs. Our Yesbuts usually happen so fast that we don’t have time to cancel, neutralize, upgrade them, but catching them anyway, even after the fact, is an excellent practice that will allow us to catch them sooner.

Cancel, neutralize, upgrade, by the way, is a practice recommended by Bryan deFlores. He’s waaaay out there, but he also has a good command of what’s really happening. First we cancel our “unintended” – or unconsciously intended – negative thought. Then we neutralize the vibrational energy it sent to the Universe, so the Universe doesn’t need to mirror it back to us. Then we upgrade the part of ourself which emitted the original negative thought.

Yesterday’s US Supreme Court decision affirming that government is Of the Corporations, For the Corporations, By the Corporations is a good example. Nothing new about this doctrine, it’s over a hundred years old, but yesterday’s publicity stirred up a healthy reaction – 15,000 signatures added to that petition overnight. Back when we was in high school, the snow was sooo deep – no, wait – the civics text labeled a government that was run by business interests as fascism. Small wonder that their lackies are yelling about everyone else being “socialist.”

We’ll put on our Economic Geographer hat soon and write about how the wealth of the Empire is being sapped by uprisings in the Colonies, how that’s actually a very good thing, and how the Multinationals are clever enough to fatten themselves in both troughs. It doesn’t work anymore to be a shareholder, because it’s not the shareholders that are being fattened. Our biggest challenge is always to discriminate between Real trends on the ground, and our limiting Beliefs. Resisting the former is futile, but confusing the two is fatal to our Dream. How do we accomplish this discrimination? Well, both/and, as usual.

So these Corporations are driving the train, and they may be able to see where the tracks go better than we can. How do we get on board, so we can enjoy any crumbs that might fall from their table? The obvious answer would be working for them, but that’s usually too Soul-sapping to consider. Since we don’t have a good answer for that question, it’s one we have to give to the Universe. We ask, God, how can we benefit from the Reality of this trend toward Corporatization? and then we absolutely let the issue slide right out of the mind, since the mind can only rehash ideas that have been proven not to work. There may be niches (think Zappos for instance) where one might be able to feed both Body and Soul. We only need one.

Then there’s the other side of the coin. We need to ask, Why do we waste our energy on resistance to the Corporations? Why do we see them as evil incarnate? A zillion answers spring to mind, most centered around 1938 and Authority issues, but we’re better off to float the question to the Universe, and wait for answers to appear that are loving and gentle and don’t require hard work. But right now, till Feb 16, astrology advises us that working with our Authorityissues (or whatever issues arise for us) will be more powerful than trying to work for or against Corporatization. Clearing our own Authority issues will make everything we do more productive.

We been talking about 2010 and 2010-2019, and we’ve got several elements yet to discuss, and we also need to stop and review the major chunks we’ve listed so far, like the Sacred Clowns and the Boundaries, not to mention the Identities and the Beliefs. But right now, let’s take a minute and go up to a much much higher altitude, if time can be said to have an altitude, and review the landscape from there. Time certainly has an attitude, so we guess it can have an altitude.

We look at the flavors of time from the perspective of the Cycles between the planets. We consider the longest Cycle to have the “biggest” impact, because it’s deepest in the Unconscious. The deeper we go into the Uncon, the more events and personalities are controlled by the Cycle’s agenda, and the less we’re aware of it. That’s more trivial than it sounds, we just don’t notice. For instance, imagine no cars and no trains, and having to go everywhere by horse. Oh, by the way, no electricity and no telephones, not even landlines.

Feels like a quaint old English novel, doesn’t it. Well, that Reality is only a little more than a century distant. The current Reality always surrounds us and infuses us so thoroughly that we forget that it’s merely one time landscape out of many. But as the Veil thins, those other landscapes bleed through more easily, so it behooves us to stretch our identities a bit.﻿ By the Veil, we mean the illusion that we exist as individuals (as opposed to WeBeAllOne), and the illusion that all those alternate Realities are separate from ours, let alone that our Reality is the Onliest.

Just to give you an example of the power of these here Big Cycles, some two-and-a-half millennia back, the three most remote traditional planets – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – came together in a triple conjunction, initiating new Neptune-Pluto, Uranus-Pluto, and Uranus-Neptune Cycles all at once. Under that initiation, whodoyaspose was born? Only Aristotle, Guatama Buddha, Lao Tsu, and Confucius. A regular Old Boys Club.

We need to remind again that ours is only one perspective; the view that the shortest Cycle is the most powerful is just as valid – or any given intermediate Cycle for that matter. The shortest Cycles are most likely to fill our Awareness, and that’s important too, for obvious reasons. How many of us have not correlated anything with the Cycles of the Moon? Maybe because we live so far from the Sea that we’ve never seen the tides, and we’ve never worked in emergency services? And if the Moon can pull on the Ocean as much as it does, what is it doing to us little ninety-some-percent Water Beings? Women know these things, even if men don’t.

Neptune-Pluto

The biggest/longest Cycle of all (not counting Mike Brown‘s newbie “minor planets”) is the Neptune-Pluto Cycle. Neptune-Pluto initiated in 1891, at 9 degrees of Gemini. That gives the whole 500-year Cycle the theme, A quiver filled with arrows. There’s a story about Lewis & Clark encountering a band in the Bitterroots who ran around like Keystone Cops trying to put an arrow into a Deer so they could feast their guests. Even as a sport, bow hunting is a very sophisticated process, with a lot more stealthing and merging than killing. The Symbol is not about bombs, but arrows. Aim for the Heart, get to the Heart of the matter would work.

Plus, the arrows are stillin the quiver – it’s about potential, not about violence. Pluto can be transformed, but not avoided, and Neptune is about our relationship to Spirit. So we might be asking how is our relationship to Spirit being transformed in this five-century span? If we look at history since 1891, we might suppose that it’s about finding ways to keep the arrows in the quiver, or how to get them backin. We can easily see the arrows not just as killing machines, but also as industrial technology, including “intellectual property” like banking methods. Will we use the machines for people, or against people? Transformation required.

Nine degrees of Gemini implies that we’ve been dissembling our relationship to Spirit, and now we’re putting the finishing touches on the deconstruction. We aren’t creating a new relationship to Spirit in this half-millennium. We’re surrendering, to the fact that we have no idea what Spirit is, or how to groove with it. It’s not about definition or control or moralities, it’s about yielding completely to Mystery.

This is the Big Picture for another 375 years yet, loooong past the Singularity. Neptune is today just over 51 degrees ahead of Pluto, right on the Seventh Harmonic. The Seventh Harmonic is about Shamanic Power, which is to say, letting your energy build, so it maxes out atthe precise moment when it will have the greatest impact, and then engaging fully in its orgasmic release. The Shaman cannot expect that his or her identities will survive a trance intact, because healing occurs only when the trance is more powerful than the identities.

Because Pluto has an irregular orbit, Neptune-Pluto was also in the Seventh Harmonic from 1938 to 1941. Whether to keep the arrows in the quiver was a dominant theme in the English-speaking world during that period. The current Neptune-Pluto Seventh Harmonic spans late 2000 to early 2012, and arrows have been flying out of the quiver for most of this period so far, as they were from 1938 to 1941. The earlier period led into an even bigger conflagration. Shall we visualize a better outcome this time?

One country spends over 40% of the World’s entire weapons budget, which it labels “defense,” while preaching to the rest of the World how wonderful it is. That country might be a good object for visualizations, though it didn’t seem to do much good in 1938. But then the World has changed since then, including a complete Chiron-Neptune Cycle. And we need to cancel, neutralize, upgrade the images that have been smothering commercial television for the last week. We don’t need that kinda programming; we’ve lived it too many times on our own already. If you’ve been using it to release your own karma, more Power.

If we want to take away one core idea about this Neptune-Pluto Cycle, it might be directionality. The Spiritual capacitor is charging, and as it charges we’re learning to release our preconceptions so we can allow Spirit to guide each of us in our own right direction, toward the Heart, away from judgments, with our weapons sheathed.

We’ll look at the other Big Cycles, the context for everything we’re doing and everyone we’re being, in subsequent chapters.

It’s both/and, right? Both Descent and Ascent – that’s the nature of transformation. We’re eternally grateful to Susun Weed for this both/and insight, by the way. So let’s talkabit about some of the other upsides.

The Queen of Upside is, of course, the (Jupiter)-Chiron-Neptune initiation, the new beginning of this 65-year cycle, the theme of which is Fresh Violets in an ancient pottery bowl, with equal gratitude to Marc Edmund Jones for the Sabian Symbols. Chiron-Neptune’s the waaay biggest upside, not to diminish any of the garnishes that we’ll eventually get to. We’ve gone on about the Grand Cross because it’s important, but the Chiron-Neptune conjunction is actually by far the most profound element in the chart for this Decade.

The Jupiter part? Jupiter’s the amplifier, yes, but it’s a bit more than that. It’s also a great benific influence. Jupiter shadowed Chiron-Neptune for most of 2009, but on the Solstice it moved past for good. So on the Solstice we lost sight of our optimism. It’ll be back; come mid-February, it’ll be obvious where the forward direction lies. But between now and then, our assignment, should we choose to accept it, is to remove as many of our karmic blinders as we possibly can.

This morning we stumbled across a video on Iran made by Rick Steves that’s chock full of identity-expanders. It reminds us that Belief is Identity’s first cousin. Belief is what Chiron-Neptune is all about. Those of you with a strong connection to Spirit already know about “Miracles” – events for which we can’t easily pull a cause-and-effect explanation out of the box.

Any storebought shrink’ll tell ya that this kinda “magical thinking” is childish. And yes, that’s precisely what we need to do – recover the awe and mystery and insatiable curiosity we experienced as kids. Contrary to popular custom, Childish is a Skill, not an affliction. Of course, as adults, we want both/and.

We all have karmic blinders, aka limiting Beliefs. The Universe is infinite, yet we believe that our piece of it is constrained by all sorts of stated and unstated rules.

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Think of something you wantmost. Then, quickly write down Three Reasons why you don’t have it already. Go ahead, take just one minute and do this, before you read on.

* * * *

This is all you need. Each one of those Reasons identifies a limiting Belief, and with Chiron crossing Neptune a month from now, the time to stretch our Beliefs is now – this is the once-in-65-years opportunity, when the window is wide open. Neptune corresponds to the cultural elements in the Unconscious, our programming, those unstated seven-generation rules that yer Mum learned from her Mum, that may have stopped being useful several Mums back. Or Dads.

Let’s review again. In Freud’s worldview, the subconscious is the dungeon where we’ve hidden our worst slimies and our meanest Ogres. But in Jung’s view, the Unconscious is the daylight basement where we’ve hidden the Treasure. Of course both views have great relevance. In many a fairytale we slog our way through the slimies and kill the Ogres to get to the Treasure. But we can also just see the subcon and the Uncon as two different doors at the bottom of the basement stairs. We can dip into our Treasure anytime we want, just by daydreaming about what we want more than anything else in the World.

But till we figure out that the Ogres and slimies are actually our greatest skills in disguise and allow them to befriend us, it stays just that, daydreaming. If you’re discouraged about the future, have a carpenter avatar put a window into the door to your Treasure Room, so your Daydream is always close to your thoughts and emotions. The glint of bling will keep you motivated.

For some folks, the glow is too distracting already, and you may need to tint the glass or partially pull the shade. This would be you, if you’re too spaced out to plan how to manifest your Dream, or if you’re too impatient that your Dream is taking soooo long to get created. Sure, it is about the journey, not the destination, but there’s no reason the journey can’t be fun too. The journey’s just a series of destinatons.

First thing we need to do is personalize our Three Reasons. We can divide each Reason into a Willingness part, a Projection part, and a Belief part. Let’s take an example.

One of our Reasons might be something like I’m not willing to work that hard. The Willingness part jumps right out of this one. If we aren’t willing it, then it’s the wrong method for us. We might be willing to play that hard, or we maybe we’d be willing to work softly. Like a new pair of pants, ya just gotta try it on, see what fits. If it feels good, yer getting there. It might help to shift from what we’re willing to what we enjoy. Joy has a lot more creative power than Will.

The Projection part is how other folks, or the World, limits us. It might not pop out like the Willingness part did, but this particular Reason implies that the World only rewards hard work. So we might rephrase this Reason into something like What if I lived in a World that handsomely rewarded the kind of work I really enjoy doing? Sound far-fetched? A Miracle like this is possible because “the World” is a mirror for our Beliefs. Our disbelief is our opportunity.

Once we’ve worked through the Willingness and Projection, we can get down to the Belief part. That’s always an “I” statement. In this case it might be something like I must believe that getting what I want has to be a reward for something! Whoa, now we’re getting somewhere. Lots of us were programmed into reward-and-punishment. Our culture positively reeks of it. Original Blessing never held a candle to Original Sin, and it seems like Christ’s attempts to convey Unconditional Forgiveness have been misunderstood more often than understood.

So after we personalize it, I’m not willing to work that hard might come down to an affirmation or prayer something like It’s okay to want what I want, and I want it unconditionally, without having to pay for it! Please, Sir, may I have some more?

Now if that triggers the Ogre of Guilt (funny, that came out Guild and Guile before it got to Guilt – Freud lives!), that’s the other half of our work, or our play. Where does he live in our body, this Ogre? Can we breathe into him there? Can we love him into submission? Can we tap him into emotional oblivion? Scroll down to the January 3 entry (Eclipse 12/31/2009 Ch.3) if you don’t recognize the suggestions. He’s only masquerading as Guilt – who knows what sort of talent he’ll reveal once you love him into being your ally. This transformation is not an intellectual process, so don’t even try to think the talent. You’ll discover it later, but only when you aren’t looking.

Chiron represents the edge between the impossible and the possible, between the intangible and the tangible, between Despair and Miracle. When we have a belief that what we want is impossible, that’s the worst kind of Despair, because we don’t even know that we’re in Despair. Chiron is a captured comet that in its fifty-year journey around the Sun travels out to touch the orbit of Uranus, then comes back within the orbit of Saturn. Saturn represents the limit of who we believe ourself to be. Uranus represents the limitless but not directionless energy of the individual Soul. It’s what you want that betrays the direction.

As the cultural Unconscious, Neptune symbolizes our relationship to God, including our beliefs about Grace and Retribution. Chiron-Neptune makes a good metaphor for the whole Rapture/Apocalypse business, with Chiron delivering the Retribution or the Grace. Many of us, to one degree or another, were programmed to put more faith in Retribution than in Grace. Even when Abundance visits us, we believe it’s because we earned it, or because God’s on our side (both of which are just positive Retribution), rather than the direct result of Grace. Grace operates beyond Cause and Effect.

So why isn’t it all Grace and Glory and Abundance and Fun? Well, maybe we want more than that. Or maybe as an individual Soul we wanted to create a lifetime where we were challenged to give up what we want, in order to learn perseverance. Maybe we want practice turning roadblocks into speedbumps. Fritz Perls’s gift to the World was the notion that you could take any given Yesbut and turn it into an additional want.

For instance, maybe you want Abundance, but you don’twant more than your share. Translating the don’t want into a want, we might end up with wanting Abundance and, say, Fairness. Hmmm, Fairness might be kinda tricky. Easy to think of more Yesbuts. F’rinstance, does that mean everybody has to get the same allocation? How we gonna implement that? But Fairness may feel good in your body – the yesbuts might just be ours. This is about the chord between your Individual Soul and your human Youness, which are both unique. It’s totally personal.

But it does bring up another point – How we gonna implement that is exactly where Miracle enters the picture. Any time we’re thinking about the mechanism for getting what we want, we’re eliminating the possibility of Miracle, because Miracle occurs beyond any mechanism we can understand. Worth repeating.

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Any time we’re thinking about the mechanism for gettingwhat we want, we’re refusing to accept the possibility of Miracle, because Miracle occurs beyond any mechanism we can understand.

* * * *

That’s the whole idea, getting out beyond our Beliefs. That’s the current opportunity. If you wanna use the energy to just further your wants within the confines of your current Beliefs, go ahead. But if you have any dissatisfaction around your current wantlist, the time is now to leap beyond it. Unless you live another 70 years, you won’t see another opportunity like this one.

Seth, in Jane Roberts’s Nature of Personal Reality, had an alternate approach. He said that your current Reality is a perfect snapshot of your unsconscious Beliefs. Anything in your field that you don’t want? Ask yourself, what limiting Belief does this reflect? You probably want to use a right-brain technique – ask the question, then change the subject. Any time you notice that YOU want to answer the question, that’s thought, and thought can only mirror your current limitations.

The Beliefs that are limiting you are unconscious – that means they inhabit some location which you don’t currently define as part of You. You haven’t stretched your identity set that far yet. So the real answer has to come from someone or somewhere else. And it will. Hard to not think of an elephant, so you probably want to switch to another channel rather than trying not to think about your question. Busy your body, or turn on a video that triggers your emotions, or lose your thoughts in some engrossing project.

It’s the old lost car-keys trick. You ask the Universe, where are my car keys? and, if you succeed in changing the subject so your thoughts are elsewhere, you’ll pick up a magazine because the picture on the cover caught your eye, and your keys will be under it. Same with your unconscious limiting Beliefs. Just one caveat. Like Fritz Perls advises, you have to translate the answer back into positive terms. The answer you hear might indeed be Because yer lazy! but unless you think lazy is a fine attribute, you’ll need to locate the Skill behind the Ogre that’s masked as lazy.

Could be efficiency. Could be that what you need most right now is rest and self-nurturing. Could be that you aren’t willing to bust yer bottom on somebody else’s goals, when you were programmed to believe that they were supposed to be your goals. You could even use the car-keys method on this task. You ask the Universe What limits my Abundance? and change the subject, then yer housemate walks in, and happens to say, Gosh yer lazy! cuz you aren’t working on something they want you to do. So then you ask the Universe, Thanks! How does that look when it’s recast as a Skill? Then ya gotta change the subject again of course.

Lotsa detail about how, so let’s go back and review what. That’s what Chiron-Neptune advises us to do – focus on what rather than how. That’s the Miracle.

Oops. We was confusing annular with penumbral and thinking an annular Eclipse meant the shadow was crossing just a corner, like the Lunar Eclipse – which was actually partial. But annular means that the Moon is at the farther end of its oblong orbit, so the Moon appears to be smaller than the Sun, so it doesn’t block out the whole Sun, even though it does cross the center of the Sun. An alert reader sends us the evidence – thanks! Here are links to great summaries of the mechanics of both the Solar and the Lunar Eclipses. If you haven’t already, please support Wikipedia; it’s amazing!

Wouldn’t it be great if we could summarize astrological interpretations as concisely as we can the mechanics? Of course, Authorities can agree on mechanics, for a while anyway, while there are as many interpretations as there are astrologers, and then some. That’s because meaning is in the Heart, and we all respond to different Meanings because as individuals we all have different Values and we all hold different things Sacred, and because as personalities we’re all growing and changing. Oh my, that’s what these particular eclipses meant, wasn’t it! Well whaddayaknow, it just goes ’round in circles.

Well, dunno about you, but we’re still digesting this descent into Chaos idea about the last quarter of the Saturn-Pluto cycle. That descent notion kinda popped outa nowhere, but it fits all too well. The 1973-1982 date range, and the quote from Mark Hulbert, was the clincher. Remember the Watergate Hearings? OPEC? 20% interest rates? WPPSS?

WPPSS was, quoting Wikipedia, “the largest municipal bond default in the history of the United States, acquiring the nickname ‘whoops’ in the financial media.” Electricity users in parts of the US are still paying for it, literally. WPPSS let every scammer and Ponzi schemer slide off the hook, because they could just tell their clients, “Gosh, all yer money was in WPPSS. Too bad!” Here’s a link to an important Bill Moyers program about today’s all-too-parallel equivalent.

Now, we been very optimistic about the new Chiron-Neptune initiation we get in mid-February, and we remain so. But the last two Chiron-Neptune cycle initiations were also associated with major economic and political disruptions. So the 37-year Saturn-Pluto cycle and the 65-year Chiron-Neptune cycle appear to be ganging up on us. Which means we better have a pretty good plan for making lemonade, eh?

Is it selfish to want to thrive when the World is crashing around us? Well, yes. Selfish is good here. If we crash too, then we’re a lot less helpful to everyone else. Sure, we’ll have to explore the boundaries between Abundance (having enough to share) and Avarice (not having enough to share), but we’re doing that work anyway. We don’t go around telling people “Every time one door closes another one opens” when they’re in Grief, because it’s insulting. But it is irrefutably true that disruption and opportunity are opposite sides of the same coin. So let’s get ready.

We know it’s all about identity. So here’s a link to a wide-ranging talk by Chris Hedges about what’s going on, that’ll probably push your edges. Listen all the way through, including the questions, if you can. If our primary objective (see Focus on #1 below) is to expand our set of functioning identities, then our first task is to embrace each discomfort that we encounter, as a doorway into doing exactly that. I should say that over in several different ways, to be clear.

When we experience discomfort, it’s because we’ve bumped up against the limits of our identity set. We know, we know, ya stub yer toe, it’s cuz ya bumped into yer table, not the edge of yer dang identity set. Go to both/and. There’s always an identity issue involved when you feel discomfort. It’s not one or the other. Stubbing your toe is one unitary experience. “Dang that hurts!” is one totally valid perspective on that experience. So is “Who moved that table?!?” And so is “Who is feeling this pain?” The only time when there may notbe an identity issue involved, is when yer dead, and even that’s open to question.

We have no interest in trivializing this as “Oh, yeah, I recognize that, it’s just a Buddhist perspective.” It might be, but it’s a lot bigger than that. Push yer Toe into the floor. Feel the pressure? Push just to the edge of discomfort. What do you experience? And what part of you is doing the experiencing? Where is your experience centered? In yer Head? In yer Belly? Can you move the center of your experience into your Toe? Does that shift the nature of your experience? Chances are you’ll be able to expand yer identity set a fair amount with a simple exercise like this.

Spend a few minutes thinking about any major transitions in your life. First day of gradeschool. Of highschool. Getting a job. Moving. Getting married. Having a child. Getting redundant. Traveling. Getting divorced. Who you were a month before the transition, and who you were a month after the transition, were probably vastly different. You probably believed at the time that the transition required you to give up some parts of your identity. No more teachers’ dirty looks and all that. But then, after a while, you discovered that you had to recover the parts you thought you had to give up. Your identity set doesn’t shrink, though sometimes parts of it hibernate.

We may be used to thinking No more teachers’ dirty looks is about our experience of being in school. But it’s also about our identity during the experience. A teacher’s dirty look might invoke fear, or guilt, or anger, or curiosity, or even amusement. It depends on who’s seeing the dirty look, doesn’t it. All those actors – the ones experiencing fear, guilt, et al – and many more are part of your identity set, and at any given moment a few of them are playing the leads, with others making up the supporting cast. Some of your identities are in the audience. Others are out to lunch, or home sick, or out of town. Does this make any sense?

It’s all too common for us to get tranced into a corner of the stage, where we have only a few identities available to us. For instance, if we meet some experience that triggers a deeply felt experience we had as a child, we’re likely to regress to the age we were then. If we do, then we can get into a timewarp and lose all of the identities we’ve developed since that age. That can leave us having to deal with adult situations using only the skill set of a four-year-old. Thankfully, four-year-olds have a lot more skills than adults give them credit for, but it’s still a smaller skillset than the one that’s needed.

There’s an old Recovery-Movement trick where we ask ourself, What color is the wallpaper? That simple question puts us back into the Present Moment, where we have access to our full skillset. Since we weren’t in the habit of asking that question at age four, we won’t remember to ask the question when we’re tranced out. So practice. Think about the last time you felt inadequate or overwhelmed or scared. Then go to the wallpaper. Then back to the overwhelm. Then to the wallpaper. You can build a new habit easily, just by practicing it. Twenty seconds a day for a week, and it’s yours.

A flexible identity set is one very powerful foundational tool to help us make lemonade – or margaritas – when the World descends into Chaos. It’s a foundation. It may not be a skill that gets you water and food and shelter directly, but it’s easy to see how lack of this skill can separate you from water and food and shelter. Ever felt shy? Or shame? Those are identities that operate in their own darkness, identities that mirror disapproval or bullying we got somewhere along the line. Either one can keep you hungry amid plenty. But wait, hungry is also an identity, isn’t it.

You see, we all have a great deal of skill at this already, we may just not think about it much from this angle. Bring it up into consciousness; we’ll be needing it. It’s also exactly what the Planetary Energies are asking us to do this year and this Decade. It’s one description of the Grace and Skill that complements the Grand Cross in the 12/31/2009 Eclipse chart that governs the Decade. Just one description. The Planetary Energy, like a Toestubbing, is a unitary experience. Words are a snapshot, one still photo from one angle of one tiny corner of the Energy, which is infinite.

So, what about the New Year New Decade Eclipse Grand Cross? We never want to sell a Grand Cross short, so we’ll go into this at some length.

We know Awareness is involved, because it’s an eclipse. We know Emotion is involved, because it’s an eclipse of the Moon. We know that one of the fundamental faux choices presented to us will be to feel like EITHER we need to do it the way Mom would do it, OR we need to do it the way Dad would do it, because the Eclipse Sun was in Capricorn (Dad, or pragmatically) and the Moon in Cancer (Mom, or empathetically). Of course not all Dads are pragmatic, and not all Moms are empathetic, so you may need to swap out some of the characters in your own play.

We know that the consequences of not being true to our own values will be dire, because Venus (our values) is outabounds (strong) adjacent to the Sun (an integral part of the essence of the situation). The dire part of the equation comes from Pluto, which sits adjacent to Venus. Pluto is that force of history, powerful to ride and painful to resist. Of course that’s an either/or, suggesting that we’ll get a lot of mileage out of learning how to tack. An easier reading would be that we’ll be compelled to live our truth.

Then there’s Saturn. Saturn’s doing this Fourth-Harmonic thing with Pluto, which we discussed at length elsewhere. For now we might label the Saturn-Pluto portion of the Grand Cross as transforming (Pluto) our relationship to Authority (Saturn). Or more precisely, preparing for descent into Anarchy. Who said that? Have we been listening to the news too much? We are a sometime Cusack fan, but we don’t need to help advertise his movies. Certainly for the part of us that likes to feel in control, which by the way is healthy, the Decade could feel like Anarchy at times.

We better look into this before we move on. When were the prior periods that saw Saturn traversing the last quarter of it’s cycle with Pluto? The last quarter of any cycle is about letting go, emptying out the Vessel (that’d be us) so there’s plenty of room for the next cycle’s energies. We won’t be coming into the next Saturn-Pluto cycle until 2020 – conveniently, the end of the Decade. If you’re old enough to remember, or you know your history, look to 1973-1982 and 1940-1947 and 1907-1914.

Hmmm. Well, at least 1907-1914 is the period leading up to World War I rather than the War itself, so our historical periods don’t span both World Wars. 1973-1982 gives us Nixon’s second term, Ford, Carter, and two years of Reagan, before Paul Volcker knocked down the Vietnam War’s inflation legacy. This is what Mark Hulbert writes, today:

“To find any precedent for mutual fund investors’ recent behavior, you have to go back to the 1970s, when — in the wake of the punishing 1973-74 bear market — they were so traumatized that it took them years before being willing to put their faith in stocks again. In fact, equity mutual funds experienced net outflows in every calendar year following that bear market until 1982, some eight years later. These eight years after the end of the 1973-74 bear market are an ominous parallel for today’s stock market, since the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1982 was no higher than it was in 1972. And, in inflation-adjusted terms, it was a lot lower.”

Well, okay, it is time to tack. If the Planet is descending into Anarchy, how do we make the best of it? “The News” after all is just more trance formation, we as individuals definitely don’t need to live that way. Most of us don’t live in Port-au-Prince. Not to discount their pain, but if their pain is our pain, then we’re looking at an identity issue. True empathy is not merging, as merging would render us as helpless as those we’d want to help.

We’ll have to write soon about devolution. In our Western European cultures, devolution don’t get much respect. In the Hindu worldview, Shiva is one of the three primary operating principles. Not so in the West, where we might spend a few weeks doing Spring cleaning, but otherwise, the focus is on building, not deconstruction. In Hinduism, devolution is 33% of the focus, and in astrology 15-33%. In Western thought, it’s maybe 5%. In English it’s a struggle to find concepts and metaphors to talk about devolution without judgment. But hold your Horses, Virgo and Pisces, that’s a long essay. We’ll save it for later.

For now, let’s focus on how to live well during this possible descent into Anarchy. It’s not like we haven’t experienced this energy before.

Okay, we know that Pluto was close to the Sun, the Sun opposed the Moon, and Saturn sat halfway between. A Grand Cross includes four planets – who was the fourth? It was the asteroid Juno. Juno is about identity. So we’ll be frequently revising our sense of who we are in this decade. That’s good to know. When we run into apparent difficulty, we can just change who we believe ourself to be. That’s actually not so hard – we usually just take a while to get it done. We’ll want to learn to shapeshift more quickly.

There’s another issue to be aware of. The Vertex sits on Saturn in this chart. The Vertex is a symbolic point that circumambulates the Zodiac daily, while Saturn takes 28 years to do it, so we’d normally never consider a Vertex configuration in a chart that spans multiple time zones. But this is a New Year chart, and like the Vertex, the New Year circles the globe in 24 hours. So the Vertex followed Saturn around the Zodiac and around the globe.

The Vertex is a weak spot in the boundary between us and other dimensions, between us and our past and parallel lives, between us and other people’s past lives, between our identity as individuals and all of the infinity of energies which we exclude from our identity. We Be All One, y’know. Yep, if you absorb even a tiny snag of the meaning of this, your identity is already descending into Anarchy. If parallel lives seem far-fetched, Netflix will rent you a Brian Greene NOVA series on string theory. Doesn’t matter if it’s controversial – it’s an additional perspective, and the more the better. Keeps us loose.

The boundaries between the Material World and the Real World were blurred by the “Loss of the Veil,” one of the four major energies in 2000-2009, but it didn’t get much coverage by the mainstream media. You had to be alert to see it changing. If you missed it, Donna Eden or Lynn McTaggart or Gary Craig could help you begin to catch up.

So a Grand Cross is about motivation and energy, and this one will keep us busy constantly adjusting our beliefs about who we are, to keep up with our own Values and stay in balance, while the World around us goes into deep reorg. We also know a sense of humor will serve us well, and whenever we can transform a limitation into a Miracle, maybe by letting go of mechanism, we get alotta extra points.

Helpful Harmonics

If all we got to work with is the Fourth Harmonic, it can get hectic. So we look for Grace and Skill to smooth the way, in the form of Third and Sixth Harmonic relations to the planets in the Grand Cross. We haven’t mentioned Third and Sixth Harmonics – we’ll describe them more in another post. But do we find them in the Eclipse chart? You bet. The other three major asteroids make Third and Sixth Harmonic angles to the corners of the Grand Cross, just what we need.

The other three major asteroids symbolize that which we hold Sacred (Vesta), boundaries (Pallas), and sustainability (Ceres).

We can differentiate several deepening levels to our Values. Juno represents what we merge with, Venus governs what’s importantto us, and Vesta symbolizes that which we hold Sacred. We can identify with things we don’t even like – especially if we’re still working on our self-appreciation. We won’t feel good when we violate our own Values. TheSacred is far deeper. We don’t transgress TheSacred without major damage to the psyche. Not that many of us weren’t programmed to do it! But we have to stop now. Of course The Sacred is different for everyone.

That which we hold Sacred is the stable foundation that we need to stay present with. Our Values will transform, our identity will shapeshift, our emotions will spin, our Channel will open wide, and our World may descend into Chaos, but by embracing our own personal version of that which we hold Sacred, we hold steady at our core.

Pallas was the Greek Goddess of War and Wisdom. Pallas asked questions first and shot only when necessary. She symbolizes boundaries that are porous enough to allow in liberal doses of love and community, and reactive enough to effortlessly shield out the Unwanted. Discernment is a gift of Grace here.

Ceres is the only asteroid between Mars and Jupiter that’s big enough for gravity to make it round, and hence it’s now defined as a Minor Planet instead of an asteroid. Ceres as in cereal, the “Bread of Life,” sustainability. Ceres was prominent in the chart of the last Decade, and as 2000-2009 progressed, sustainability became the characteristic that distinguished the future-ready from the talk-radio foxsils waving their arms and shouting as they slowly ossified.

“Defensive” is usually a negative epitaph, but here it’s the order of the day. It’s our willingness to defend The Sacred that sustains us as the World dissolves around us. Not Christian soldiers cheerleading; never forget that The Sacred is personal. Defending another’s right to hold Sacred what you don’t, is part of it, as is defending your own right to hold Sacred what the Moralists don’t, such as an individual’s right to their integrity. Quietly defending. No need to invite vitriole.

Third Harmonics are not something we have to work at, they’re gifts. Sixth Harmonics involve more consciousness, but they’re playful. So we don’t have to work at our discernment, our boundaries, our access to the Sacred, they happen to us. The combination of an energizing and motivating Grand Cross, along with Gracefull and creative Third and Sixth Harmonics, is hard to beat. We might be descending into Chaos, but not without tools.

Bottom line?

The greatest danger lies in losing our operational sense of identity, the identity that our psyche uses to relate to the external World. In an Adam cartoon once, the househusband was asked at a party, “What do you do?” and his response was “About what?” Identity is a terribly useful way to relate to the external World. “Being” a Republicrat or a husband or an engineer or a healer or a manager or a cobbler or a wife or a doctor or a sick person or a parent or a Libertarian or a boss or a ne’erdowell or a sibling or an employee or a janitor or a good person or any other noun saves us a load of effort, because we can pick our opinions and actions and reactions out of a box, and not have to ad lib.

“Being” an individual is harder, because we have to make it up as we go, and because it exposes us to misunderstanding and anger from our fellow community members, who expect us to limit our choices to those that are already in the box. At any rate, this is a misuse of the word “Being,” because it’s really a Doing. Being is something else entirely, something we don’t even touch until we go inside and look around.

And that’s the distinction that’s useful here – the doing-level identities that we wear so casually and usefully may get torn away this decade. Identity crisis, panic attack, ego death are some synonyms you may have heard of. Those are the identities we need to learn to be flexible about. But the being-level identities that we contact in meditation are the stable foundations that will sustain us. And yes, this Decade may well be more about sustenance than glitz.

If you personally have no familiarity with being-level identities, it may be worth your while to look for them. With the automatic nature of the Third and Sixth Harmonics, you may also find that being-level identities come looking for you. If I were to recommend one source as a universal reference for the Decade, it would be Stephen Levine’s book Who Dies?

Number One priority, that is. And of course Numero Uno the Self – the old saying that ya gotta love yerself first, in order to love anybody else, is ohso true. If yer thinking, hmmm, isn’t that narcissistic, then it probably ain’t. We bring up Focus because Saturn’s stationary, which is to say, strong, even dominating, and Saturn’s about limitation when our victim gets hold of it, and Saturn’s about focus and concentration when we take command of it. Resisting Saturn (aka frustration, impatience, irritation, abandonment) is just a waste of energy. Just pick something that motivates you, and dive in head first.

Saturn comes to Full Stop at 8am PST on Wednesday, January 13. Whenever we give a time, you can click on it to see what time it’ll be in your part of the World; if we don’t list your time zone, lettuce know and we’ll add it. As I write this, in my neighborhood it’s Tuesday afternoon, and we’ve finally cleared away other obligations for a bit, so writing this must be pretty important (to us).

Once we get this short note done, we’ll write about the Eclipse Grand Cross, and in that note you’ll discover that Saturn’s dancing a Fourth Harmonic with Pluto. By now you can probably begin to guess what that might mean, but we’ll cover it at length there. For now, what we need to know is that when Saturn’s doing it’s standingstill thing, Mercury is crossing Pluto. Of course this lights up our Eclipse Grand Cross bigtime, but for the moment let’s just talk about Mercury, Pluto, and Saturn.

Well, first we need to know that Mercury’s also slowing down for a turnaround, on Friday at 9am PST. That amps up the whole drama another notch. Saturn’s going introverted (ie, stationary retrograde in astologuese), bytheway, while Mercury’s coming out of it’s thrice-annual three weeks of respite (ie, stationary direct). That’ll help loosen up whatever’s stuck, but till Friday, Mercury’s still retrograde – we’re still internal.

Plus, in between, just after 11pm PST on Thursday, there’s another Eclipse! Busy busy busy. This one is an eclipse of the Sun, but it’s annular (ie, barely), so there’s little in the way of bling. I’m not even going to talk about this eclipse, because Kelley Hunter does a fantastic job of it already. You can sign up for her email newsletters at http://www.heliastar.com. A radiant Sprite dances upon the mist of a waterfall, says she, pointing out how Venus is involved. I’m focusing more on the 12/31 Eclipse because it impacts the horoscope that initiates the Decade, and so colors our experience for ten years.

So let’s focus on this Mercury-Saturn-Pluto business. Pluto’s that business about history, that which is impossible to avoid, but absolutely about transformation. Thinking of history as trance formation is not only right on, but so terribly relevant to our current Chiron-Neptune revolution! Remember, Chiron-Neptune is about choosing whether to believe in limitation or to believe in Miracles, which is to say, if you aren’t choosing Miracles, you’re choosing limitation.

Meanwhile, it’s easy to pin the concept of Awareness on both Mercury and eclipse, so we can build our summary of what’s going on here as something like

Becoming aware of our beliefs in limitation, and opening ourselves to insights about how to transform limitation into Miracle.

A Grand Cross, as the name suggests, is two polarities, two oppositions, that are perpendicular, forming a cross. The Fourth Harmonic is one fourth of the way around the Zodiacal circle. Because the two poles of the Grand Cross are perpendicular, each end of each polarity is Fourth Harmonic to each of the ends of the other polarity. Astrologers call the Fourth Harmonic a square, because it can make a four-sided figure. A Grand Cross is made up of four Fourth Harmonics.

The Fourth Harmonic is about competence. Trouble is, it’s relentless. It’s competence, not confidence. In other words, it’s about motivation, or energy. Like one of those teachers we had in grade school, or the high school PE teacher – the better we performed, the more they expected of us. It’s not about positive and negative reinforcement, it’s about no reinforcement or empathy, just increasing expectations. At least, that’s the way it looks to us when we expect things to be easier.

It’s a funhouse mirror for our own perfectionism. The classic Greek drama is about having to choose between two options, neither of which works. That Oedipal view of Fate seems bleak to most of us, but charts with a big emphasis on the Fourth Harmonic produce those kind of dramas, because the Fourth Harmonic is where Power resides, and the more Power we try to use, the more practice we need with it, if we don’t want to get burnt by it.

Power isn’t a choice. It’s not use it or lose it, it’s use it or get burned by it. While we’re on the subject, we should remind that Power is never given, it’s always taken. It needs a great deal of practice, if we’re going to take and use Power lovingly and gently. Without practice, Power looks more like confidence than competence. You can measure confidence by the angle of your jaw. You measure competence by how many times it gets smacked.

Competence is like wisdom. We don’t get it by thinking about it, and that’s the root of the dilemma. The thinking perspective creates what appears to be a binary World, an either/or World. Out behind the mirror, it’s a both/and World. So sure, the Oedipal choice is a lose-lose proposition. We need to choose a third course, or a fourth, or a fifth. Why limit ourself to two choices? We just step off of our karmic treadmill, and the World becomes larger. “Just get off the bus, Gus,” as Paul Simon so aptly puts it.

Not that it’s easy to recognize our own karmic treadmill, take ownership of it, and step off. But that’s the recipe. Differentiate our own karmic treadmill from the perp holograms around us, take ownership of it, and step off. The Fourth Harmonic demands that we do this. Karma forces us to use the same Skill in any circumstance. Competence would have us use Skills appropriate to the situation. It’s the Fourth Harmonic that offers us this Liberation.

The Fourth Harmonic seems problematic because it’s bigger and wider than Second-Harmonic phenomena like Thinking. Most of us also do Emotion as a Second-Harmonic process. There’s anger and then there’s forgiveness, either/or. We don’t gain competence by emoting about it any more than we get competence by thinking about it. Anything we do either/or is too limited for the Fourth Harmonic.

We bring all this up because one of the primary configurations in the 12/31/2009 Eclipse horoscope, which is basically the horoscope for 2010 and the Teens, is a Grand Cross. The Grand Cross is one of two big Fourth-Harmonic patterns, and it represents energy, action, motivation, balance, constant motion. The Fourth Harmonic is motivating because it’s never quite right, it always needs a bit of tweaking here, a little adjustment there.

Before we dissect this Grand Cross, let’s propose how to respond to the Fourth Harmonic, since our response is what separates the difficulty which mainstream astrology assigns to it, from the Liberation we know is available from it. This is a wide-angle recipe. It needs to be customized many ways to be useful.

First, identify the major perp or perps who have limited your Joy all of your life. Men?Women? Bosses? Clients? Disease? Money? Scarcity? Mom? Dad? Recognition? This will be iterative, it will have many levels, and like a video game or any double-agent story, the perp’s identity will change as you go deeper. You can use the same process with any momentary hassle. For many people right now, it might be If only I had a good job, or If only I had more money.

Second, identify the behavior of theirs that limits you. Do they, or does it, reject you? Avoid you? Disrespect you? Cheat on you? Talk behind your back? Confuse you? Tie you up in knots? Hide from you? Make unreasonable demands? Make you uncomfortable or miserable? Keep you from what you want? There may be more than one behavior, but start with just one. For many now, their good job, or more money, might be hiding from them.

The third step is to own the behavior. If the World is a mirror, and we choose to co-create the World we want, and a Demon is harassing us, we need to turn and face the Demon. We have found the enemy, and it is us, as Pogo once said. How are we hiding from ourself? How are we making unreasonable demands on ourself? How are we disrespecting ourself, or cheating ourself, or torturing ourself? No guilt, no blame, no shame, no reprisals, this is not an emotional process. Take the first answer that comes to you when you ask the question.

If you do encounter guilt or blame or shame or grief, go with it. Locate it in your body and embrace it lovingly. Treat it like you would a lost child, with empathy and caring and concern. Tap it out. It’s a great opportunity. This process is not about emotional release, it’s about changing your perspective, but any unpleasant emotion is a fabulous opportunity to loosen the emotional bonds we have to our karma. We been living with it a long time, it’s an old friend. Why would we abandon it now? It keeps us safe.

The fourth step is to change the subject, just move on, get on with your life. You’ve already changed. Even if you didn’t get a clear answer to the question about how you yourself might be creating some faint ghost of Your Perp’s behavior, some funhouse mirror of what’s hassling you, having asked the question is enough. Your larger self will do the rest. This process only takes a few minutes, then you’re done. You might be repeating it many times a day, but each time, start over.

Wait now. What did we say a few minutes ago? Our karma keeps us safe? Safe from what? Fear of failure is the critical part of the Fourth Harmonic that keeps us locked in limitation. Wisdom and competence arise from experience. If we avoid the experiences that might end in failure, we won’t find competence. It’s all practice. We’d be clever to measure risk, so our “failures” are smaller. We don’t build muscle by starting with the 300-pound weight.

But we can’t run Fourth-Harmonic energy in a framework of success and failure. Fourth Harmonic energy demands the perspective of curiosity. What will happen if we do this? If we do that? How can we experiment to see what will work, without risking the whole game? Always trying something new, always taking little risks, always moving our range of experience and competence a little further out, always nurturing with ourself, always giving ourself room to explore, but expanding our comfort zone a little at a time. The Fourth-Harmonic objective is experience, not success.